Blogging Break – New Job And Sick

Due to my new job, I haven’t had as much time to work on my blog, and I’ve fallen behind. I exhausted my draft queue. I normally try to make one post per day.

Also, I have a pretty bad cold.

At my new job, I have the misfortune of working with some consultants from Bigtime Evil Consulting. I work for a different consulting company, hired by the same bank. Bigtime Evil Consulting set up the software and we are users. The Bigtime Evil Consulting twits are good at emotional manipulation. They are rude and condescending and extremely unprofessional. The head boss from Bigtime Evil Consulting talks exactly like Lumbergh from “Office Space”. They are barely technically literate. They were supposed to set up the software we’re using, but it’s a buggy POS and they can’t set it up right.

The bank hired Bigtime Evil Consultingto set up the software and two other consulting companies as users. Bigtime Evil Consulting bid on the whole thing and was rejected. In restrospect, that was a brilliant idea, because the consulting companies are a check and balance against each other. If Bigtime Evil Consultingwere awarded the whole contract, it would have been easier for them to cover up problems. It’s an amusing strategy for mitigating the damage of incompetence, hiring different consulting companies to work on different pieces of a big project.

The project is on the doomed path. Now it’s time for the death march, the political manipulation game, and blame-deflecting. My bosses have the facts 100% on their side, because I’ve explained all the major bugs in simple reproducible details. I’m going to take a stand against demands to work unreasonable hours.

I can read the body language of the Bigtime Evil Consulting consultants, and I can tell they’re panicking. It does affect me emotionally, because when people panic like that I usually get scapegoated. When I hear them talking, I also can tell they don’t understand the complex data issues. For each example I worked through by hand, I found a DIFFERENT problem. They gave us super-simplified super-sanitized examples for User Acceptance Testing, but even those may not work. I doubt it will work with “normal” data and not super-sanitized data.

There’s one bug that makes one key program completely unusable. Instead of admitting the problem, they covered it up and hoped we wouldn’t notice. When I raised a problem report, their attitude was “It doesn’t work because you’re stupid and doing it wrong.” As skilled evil people, they don’t explicitly say that, but it’s strongly implied by the body language. That activated my BS meter. That works on most people; it would have worked on me 10 years ago. Not anymore! The Bigtime Evil Consulting consultant accidentally showed to me how to notice, confirm, and reproduce the fatal bug. I explained it to my bosses and coworkers, who don’t work for Bigtime Evil Consulting. Did they really expect us to never notice? Bigtime Evil Consulting probably advised the bank to use this lousy software (probably in exchange for a kickback), and can’t admit it’s defective.

My boss said “I have worked on several previous projects where Bigtime Evil Consulting was fired for gross negligence!”

The management at the bank is starting to joke “HAHAHA! Maybe we shouldn’t have hired Bigtime Evil Consulting!” If there’s one thing senior management at a big bank can do, it’s can read body language. It’s obvious that the Bigtime Evil Consulting twits know they’re screwed.